The Institute

by Stephen King

  He hesitated, taking a moment to let himself really understand he was on the free side of the fence. The owl hooted again, a sleepy sound. He could see fireflies stitching the dark and even in this moment of extremity realized they were beautiful.

  Do it fast, he told himself. Pretend you’re slicing a piece of steak. And don’t scream no matter how much it hurts. You cannot scream.

  Luke put the top of the blade against the top of his earlobe on the outside and stood that way for a few seconds that felt like a few eternities. Then he lowered the knife.

  I can’t.

  You must.

  I can’t.

  Oh God, I have to.

  He placed the edge of the knife against that tender unarmored flesh again and pulled down at once, before he had time to do more than pray for the edge to be sharp enough to do the job in a single stroke.

  The blade was sharp, but his strength failed him a little at the last moment, and instead of coming off, the earlobe dangled by a shred of gristle. At first there was no pain, just the warmth of blood flowing down the side of his neck. Then the pain came. It was as if a wasp, one as big as a pint bottle, had stung him and injected its poison. Luke inhaled in a long sibilant hiss, grasped the dangling earlobe, and pulled it off like skin from a chicken drumstick. He bent over it, knowing he had gotten the damned thing but needing to see it anyway. Needing to be positive. It was there.

  Luke made sure he was even with the trampoline. He put his back to it, then turned a step—a medium one, he hoped—to the right. Ahead of him was the dark bulk of the northern Maine woods, stretching for God only knew how many miles. He looked up and spotted the Big Dipper, with one corner star straight ahead. Keep following that, he told himself. That’s all you have to do. It won’t be straight on till morning, either, she told Avery it’s only a mile or so, and then it’s on to the next step. Ignore the pain in your shoulderblades, the worse pain in your calf, the worst pain of all in your Van Gogh ear. Ignore the way your arms and legs are trembling. Get going. But first . . .

  He drew his fisted right hand back to his shoulder and flung the scrap of flesh in which the tracker was still embedded over the fence. He heard (or imagined he heard) the small click it made as it struck the asphalt surrounding the playground’s paltry excuse for a basketball court. Let them find it there.

  He began to walk, eyes up and fixed on that one single star.

  21

  Luke had it to guide him for less than thirty seconds. As soon as he entered the trees, it was gone. He stopped where he was, the Institute still partly visible behind him through the first interlacing branches of the woodlands.

  Only a mile, he told himself, and you should find it even if you go off-course a little, because she told Avery it’s big. Fairly big, anyway. So walk slowly. You’re right-handed, which means you’re right-side dominant, so try to compensate for that, but not too much, or you’ll go off-course to the left. And keep count. A mile should be between two thousand and twenty-five hundred steps. Ballpark figure, of course, depending on the terrain. And be careful not to poke your eye out on a branch. You’ve got enough holes in you already.

  Luke began walking. At least there weren’t any thickets to plow through; these were old-growth trees, which had created a lot of shade above and a thick layer of underbrush-discouraging pine duff on the ground. Every time he had to detour around one of the elderly trees (probably they were pines, but in the dark who really knew), he tried to re-orient himself and continue on a straight line which was now—he had to admit it—largely hypothetical. It was like trying to find your way across a huge room filled with barely glimpsed objects.

  Something on his left made a sudden grunting sound and then ran, snapping one branch and rattling others. Luke the city boy froze in his tracks. Was that a deer? Christ, what if it was a bear? A deer would be running away, but a bear might be hungry for a midnight snack. It might be coming at him now, attracted by the smell of blood. God knew Luke’s neck and the right shoulder of his shirt were soaked with it.

  Then the sound was gone, and he could only hear crickets and the occasional hoo of that owl. He had been at eight hundred steps when he heard the whatever-it-was. Now he began to walk again, holding his hands out in front of him like a blind man, ticking the steps off in his mind. A thousand . . . twelve hundred . . . here’s a tree, a real monster, the first branches far over my head, too high up to see, go around . . . fourteen hundred . . . fifteen hun—

  He stumbled over a downed trunk and went sprawling. Something, a stub of branch, dug into his left leg high up, and he grunted with pain. He lay on the duff for a moment, getting his breath back, and longing—here was the ultimate, deadly absurdity—for his room back in the Institute. A room where there was a place for everything and everything was in its place and no animals of indeterminate size went crashing around in the trees. A safe place.

  “Yeah, until it’s not,” he whispered, and got to his feet, rubbing the new tear in his jeans and the new tear in his skin beneath. At least they don’t have dogs, he thought, remembering some old black-and-white prison flick where a couple of chained-together cons had made a dash for freedom with a pack of bloodhounds baying behind them. Plus, those guys had been in a swamp. Where there were alligators.

  See, Lukey? he heard Kalisha saying. It’s all good. Just keep going. Straight line. Straight as you can, anyway.

  At two thousand steps, Luke started looking for lights up ahead, shining through the trees. There’s always a few, Maureen had told Avery, but the yellow one is the brightest. At twenty-five hundred, he began to feel anxious. At thirty-five hundred, he began to be sure he had gone off-course, and not just by a little.

  It was that tree I fell over, he thought. That goddam tree. When I got up, I must have gone wrong. For all I know, I’m headed for Canada. If the Institute guys don’t find me, I’ll die in these woods.

  But because going back wasn’t an option (he couldn’t have retraced his steps even if he wanted to), Luke kept walking, hands waving in front of him for branches that might try to wound him in new places. His ear throbbed.

  He quit counting his steps, but he must have been around five thousand—well over two miles—when he saw a faint yellowy-orange gleam through the trees. Luke first mistook it for either a hallucination or one of the dots, soon to be joined by swarms of them. Another dozen steps put paid to those worries. The yellow-orange light was clearer, and had been joined by two more, much dimmer. Those had to be electric lights. He thought the brighter one was an arc-sodium, the kind they had in big parking lots. Rolf’s father had told them one night when he had taken Luke and Rolf to a movie at the AMC Southdale, that those kinds of lights were supposed to stop muggings and car break-ins.

  Luke felt an urge to simply bolt forward and restrained it. The last thing he wanted to do was trip over another downed tree or step in a hole and break his leg. There were more lights now, but he kept his eyes firmly fixed on the first one. The Big Dipper hadn’t lasted long, but here was a new guiding star, a better one. Ten minutes after first spotting it, Luke came to the edge of the trees. Across fifty yards or so of open ground, there was another chainlink fence. This one was topped with barbed wire, and there were light-posts along it at roughly thirty-foot intervals. Motion-activated, Maureen had told Avery. Tell Luke to stay well back. That was advice he hardly needed.

  Beyond the fence were little houses. Very little. Not enough room to swing a cat in, Luke’s own father might have said. They could contain three rooms at most, and probably just two. They were all the same. Avery said Maureen called this the village, but to Luke it looked like an Army barracks. The houses were arranged in blocks of four, with a patch of grass in the center of each block. There were lights shining in a few of the houses, probably the kind people left on in the bathroom so they wouldn’t trip over something if they had to get up and use the toilet.

  There was a single street, which ended at a larger building. To either side of this building was a s
mall parking lot filled with cars and pickup trucks parked hip to hip. Thirty or forty in all, Luke estimated. He remembered wondering where the Institute staff kept their vehicles. Now he knew, although how food was supplied was still a mystery. The arc-sodium was on a pole in front of this larger building, and it shone down on two gas pumps. Luke thought the place almost had to be some kind of store, the Institute’s version of a PX.

  So now he understood a little more. Staff got time off—Maureen had had a week to go back to Vermont—but mostly they stayed right here, and when they were off-shift, they lived in those ticky-tacky little houses. Work schedules might be staggered so they could share accommodations. When in need of recreation, they hopped in their personal vehicles and drove to the nearest town, which happened to be Dennison River Bend.

  The locals would certainly be curious about what these men and women were up to out there in the woods, they’d ask questions, and there had to be some sort of cover story to handle them. Luke didn’t have any idea what it might be (and at this moment couldn’t care less), but it must be pretty decent to have held up for so many years.

  Go right along the fence. Look for a scarf.

  Luke got moving, the fence and the village to his left, the edge of the woods to his right. Again he had to fight the urge to speed along, especially now that he could see a little better. Their time with Maureen had necessarily been short, partly because if their palaver went on too long it might raise suspicion, and partly because Luke was afraid too much of Avery’s ostentatious nose-grabbing might give the game away. As a result, he had no idea where this scarf might be, and he was afraid of missing it.

  It turned out not to be a problem. Maureen had tied it to the low-hanging branch of a tall pine tree just before the place where the security fence made a left-angle turn away from the woods. Luke took it down and knotted it around his waist, not wanting to leave such an obvious marker to those who would soon be pursuing him. That made him wonder how long it would be before Mrs. Sigsby and Stackhouse found out, and realized who had helped him escape. Not long at all, probably.

  Tell them everything, Maureen, he thought. Don’t make them torture you. Because if you try to hold out, they will, and you’re too old and too sick for the tank.

  The bright light at the building that might be a company store was quite far behind him now, and Luke had to cast around carefully before he found the old road leading back into the forest, one that might have been used by pulp-cutting woodsmen a generation ago. Its start was screened by a thick stand of blueberry bushes, and in spite of the need he felt to hurry, he stopped long enough to pick a double handful and throw them into his mouth. They were sweet and delicious. They tasted of outside.

  Once he found the old track, it was easy to follow, even in the darkness. Plenty of underbrush was growing on its eroded crown, and a double line of weeds padded what had once been wheel-ruts. There were downed branches to step over (or trip over), but it was impossible to wander back into the forest.

  He tried counting steps again, managed to keep a fairly accurate tally up to four thousand, then gave up. The track rose occasionally, but mostly it tended downward. A couple of times he came to deadfalls, and once a tangle of bushes so thick he feared the old road just stopped there, but when he pushed through, he found it again and continued. He had no sense of how much time had passed. It might have been an hour; it was probably more like two. All he knew for sure was that it was still night, and although being out here in the dark was spooky, especially for a city kid, he hoped it would stay dark for a long, long time. Except it wouldn’t. At this time of year, light would start creeping back into the sky by four o’clock.

  He reached the top of another rise and stopped for a moment to rest. He did this standing up. He didn’t really believe he would fall asleep if he sat down, but the thought that he might scared him. The adrenaline which had brought him scratching and scrabbling under the fence, then through the woods to the village, was all gone now. The bleeding from the cuts on his back and leg and earlobe had stopped, but all those places throbbed and stung. His ear was the worst by far. He touched it tentatively, then pulled his fingers back with a hiss of pain through clenched teeth. Not before he’d felt an irregular knob of blood and scab there, however.

  I mutilated myself, he thought. That earlobe is never going to come back.

  “Fuckers made me do it,” he whispered. “They made me.”

  Since he didn’t dare sit, he bent over and grasped his knees, a position in which he had seen Maureen on many occasions. It did nothing for the fence slashes across his back, his sore ass, or his mutilated earlobe, but it eased his tired muscles a little. He straightened up, ready to go on, then paused. He could hear a faint sound from ahead. A kind of rushing, like the wind in the pines, but there wasn’t even a breath of breeze where he was standing on this little rise.

  Don’t let it be a hallucination, he thought. Let it be real.

  Another five hundred steps—these he counted—and Luke knew the sound really was running water. The track grew wider and steeper, finally steep enough that he had to walk sideways, holding onto tree branches to keep from falling on his ass. He stopped when the trees on either side disappeared. Here the woods hadn’t just been cut, but stumped as well, creating a clearing that was now overgrown with bushes. Beyond and below was a wide band of black silk, running smooth enough to reflect ripples of starlight from above. He could imagine those long-ago loggers—men who might have worked in these north woods before the Second World War—using old Ford or International Harvester logging trucks to haul their cutwood this far, maybe even teams of horses. The clearing had been their turnaround point. Here they had unloaded their pulpwood and sent it skidding down to the Dennison River, where it would start its ride to the various mill towns downstate.

  Luke made his way down this last slope on legs that ached and trembled. The final two hundred feet were the steepest yet, the track sunk all the way to bedrock by the passage of those long-ago logs. He sat down and let himself slide, grabbing at bushes to slow his progress a little and finally coming to a tooth-rattling stop on a rocky bank three or four feet above the water. And here, just as Maureen had promised, the prow of a splintery old rowboat peeped from beneath a green tarp drifted with pine needles. It was tethered to a ragged stump.

  How had Maureen known about this place? Had she been told? That didn’t seem sure enough, not when a boy’s life might depend on that rickety old boat. Maybe before she’d gotten sick, she had found it on a walk by herself. Or she and a few others—maybe a couple of the cafeteria women with whom she seemed friendly—had come down here from their quasi-military village to picnic: sandwiches and Cokes or a bottle of wine. It didn’t matter. The boat was here.

  Luke eased himself into the water, which came up to his shins. He bent and scooped double handfuls into his mouth. The river water was cold and tasted even sweeter than the blueberries. Once his thirst was slaked, he tried to untie the rope tethering the boat to the stump, but the knots were complex, and time was passing. In the end he used the paring knife to saw through the tether, and that started his right palm bleeding again. Worse, the boat immediately began to drift away.

  He lunged for it, grabbed the prow, and hauled it back. Now both of his palms were bleeding. He tried to yank off the tarp, but as soon as he let go of the boat’s prow, the current began to pull it away again. He cursed himself for not getting the tarpaulin off first. There wasn’t enough ground to beach the boat, and in the end he did the only thing he could: got his top half over the side and under the tarp with its somehow fishy smell of ancient canvas, then pulled on the splintery midships bench until he was all the way in. He landed in a puddle of water and on something long and angular. By now the boat was being pulled downstream by the gentle current, stern first.

  I am having quite the adventure, Luke thought. Yes indeed, quite the adventure for me.

  He sat up under the tarp. It billowed around him, producing an even stronge
r stink. He pushed and paddled at it with his bleeding hands until it flopped over the side. It floated beside the rowboat at first, then began to sink. The angular thing he’d landed on turned out to be an oar. Unlike the boat, it looked relatively new. Maureen had placed the scarf; had she also placed the oar for him? He wasn’t sure she was capable of making the walk down the old logging road in her current condition, let alone down that last steep slope. If she had done it, she deserved an epic poem in her honor, at the very least. And all just because he’d looked some stuff up for her on the Internet, stuff she probably could have found herself if she hadn’t been so sick? He hardly knew how to think about such a thing, let alone understand it. He only knew the oar was here, and he had to use it, tired or not, bleeding hands or not.

  At least he knew how. He was a city boy, but Minnesota was the land of ten thousand lakes, and Luke had been out fishing with his paternal grandfather (who liked to call himself “just another old basshole from Mankato”) many times. He settled himself on the center seat and first used the oar to get the fore end of the boat pointed downstream. With that accomplished, he paddled out to the center of the river, which was about eighty yards wide at this point, and shipped the oar. He took off his sneakers and started to set them on the stubby aft seat to dry. Something was printed on that seat in faded black paint, and when he leaned close, he was able to read it: S.S. Pokey. That made him grin. Luke leaned back on his elbows, looking up at the crazy sprawl of the stars, and tried to convince himself that this wasn’t a dream—that he had really gotten out.

  From somewhere behind him on the left came the double blast of an electric horn. He turned and saw a single bright headlight flickering through the trees, first coming level with his boat, then passing it. He couldn’t see the engine or the train it was hauling, there were too many trees in the way, but he could hear the rumble of the trucks and the bratty squall of steel wheels on steel rails. That was what finally nailed it for him. This was not some incredibly detailed fantasy going on inside his brain as he lay sleeping in his West Wing bed. That was a real train over there, probably headed for Dennison River Bend. This was a real boat he was in, sliding south on this slow and beautiful current. Those were real stars overhead. The Minions of Sigsby would come after him, of course, but—